Best critique of the left I’ve seen in ages. It’s painfully accurate. I can’t find the Facebook post now, so it’s from memory.
On a dark, rainy night, Steve finds himself in the middle of nowhere, cold and wet and tired. Straight ahead the road forks in two, one fork to the right and another to the left. Steve knows he lives up the left hand path, right the at the far end of it. But has no idea how to get home beyond that.
There is a bus stop, and two bus companies run buses, the red company and the blue company. The red buses go up the left hand path, and the blue buses go up the right hand path. They turn up every five hours.
The red bus arrives and the guy flags it down.
“Hi. Are you going up the left hand path?” asks Steve.
“We are” says the driver.
“Brilliant” says Steve. “I live at 52 Lamcote Gardens. Please take me home”
“I’m sorry mate. I can’t take you to your door. But we’re going in that direction. Are you getting on?”
“You need to take me to my door”
“You don’t seem to understand. There are lots of people on the bus and they all live in different houses. Nobody gets to go direct to their door. Everyone has to walk a bit of the way. But we go roughly in the right direction, and everyone gets closer to home than they would otherwise.”
“But I want to go straight to my door”
“But if I take you direct to your door, then loads of people are going to realise that this bus isn’t going anywhere close to their door anymore, and they’ll get off the bus”.
“I don’t care about that” says Steve. “You should take me to where I need to be”.
The driver starts getting a bit shirty with Steve. “Look” he says “The red bus can’t run if I only go to one house. No-one will want to get on it. And what’s more, people will start getting on the blue bus, if that feels like it’s going to get them closer to their home”
“So what” says Steve. “Let them get on the blue bus. That’s the best bus for them anyway. They shouldn’t be welcome on the red bus. The red bus should just exist to get me to Lamcote Gardens”
“It’s funny you should say that”, says the Driver. “A couple of years ago, we had a Driver called Jeremy, and he would only run the bus to Lamcote Garden’s. Everybody except a couple of people who lived at Lamcote Gardens stopped using the red bus and the company nearly folded”.
Steve thinks about this. “Well, maybe more people should live on Lamcote Gardens then. If everyone lives on Lamcote Gardens like me, then the bus could go there and it would be fine”.
“That would be nice” says the driver. “But they don’t”
“Are you going to take me to Lamcote Gardens?”
“No”.
“Right” says Steve “Fuck you. You’re no better than the blue bus. I’m getting off”
“What do you mean we’re no better than the blue bus? They go up a completely different road - they’ll get you nowhere near Lamcote Gardens on the blue bus”.
“I’m obviously not getting that, am I” says Steve. “As there are no buses that take me straight to Lamcote Gardens, I won’t be getting on any bus”.
“You’re an idiot” says the driver. “I can take you closer to your house, and you’ll have to walk a bit of the way, but it’s surely better than sitting in the cold all night getting rained on”
“I would rather sit in the cold, in the rain, and go nowhere, than get on a bus that isn’t going exactly where I need it to”.
With that, Steve steps off the bus and sits on the kerb while the red bus disappears off into the distance.
Five hours pass. Steve is cold, wet, tired, and miserable. But eventually he sees the red bus rolling up again. He gets up and flags it down.
“Hello” says Steve. “Please take me to 52 Lamcote Gardens”
